- Legally, we need to be able to verify identities. We want to do this frictionlessly and in real-time rather than with some paperwork sheaf that gets mailed to you a week later. The solution looks different in almost every country.
- Visa, MasterCard, and co. have rules that effectively prevent you from using the same backends in different areas. (E.g., you can't use the same backend in Europe and the US.) So we have to rebuild a lot of our stack in each country.
- The infrastructure for doing daily deposits into bank accounts also differs by country. Often, the basic operation is relatively easy, but figuring out all of the edge-cases is hard.
- The laws in every country differ. Sometimes, we need to obtain licenses or something like that.
- Etc...
We could have hacked around this by partnering with existing payments companies in each area. That's what people usually do -- it's much cheaper and way faster. The downside is that you end up with a much worse product than what you have in the US. For obvious reasons, we didn't want to do that.
So we now have an office in London that's working full-time on bringing Stripe to other markets and we're processing production transactions in four countries.
I'm sorry that it's slow :(. I guess the tl;dr is that a substantial fraction of the work required to build Stripe in the US has to be repeated in each new country -- the work and complexity scales O(n). We're still just 55 people, and it takes time.
(Still, if you'd like to help speed it up, we're hiring!)
I don't suppose you have a rough estimate for UK roll out do you? We're planning on adding a payment gateway to our system over the next 4-6 months or so.
We'd really love to use Stripe after looking at the APIs for every other payment gateway service :)
> Visa, MasterCard, and co. have rules that effectively prevent you from using the same backends in different areas.
What's the reasoning behind that restriction? Could you just re-use your backend stack, but use a different data center / machines, that's isolated from the backend of other countries?
It's because the banks that issue credit cards have most of the negotiating leverage, and they don't want giant US banks competing on their territory on the payment acceptance side. As a result, you need to use a European bank to accept payments in Europe, a Latin American bank in Latin America, and so on. The payments industry is full of these non-obvious (and unfortunate...) power dynamics.
What about SEPA [1]? Didn't it simplify things enough? E.g. I can make bank transfers between EUR accounts from France to Poland (which is not in eurozone BTW) within a few hours (during the week) with a total cost ~€1 which is quite acceptable (of course not for €5 transfers, but the cost is fixed, so it's good enough for bigger transfers).
A Finnish banking startup, Holvi, uses online banks to verify the user's ID. And that is all they require on top of phone verification. If I recall right, they state that 'online bank authentication is the only way to verify user ID online'.
Why others don't do that, but instead ask me to file all these documents by printing and scanning them?
Is it because of bullshit regulations everywhere? Why has it taken you forever to set up shop in a couple of places in Europe? Why not the rest too?
Seriously. What is it?